Verified-identity communications company Numeracle says its telecom KYC platform is ready to support proposed Know Your Upstream Provider obligations, as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission advances stronger rules for vetting the identity of callers and the providers that carry their traffic.
Know Your Upstream Provider, or KYUP, would require voice service providers to understand, assess, and take responsibility for the business entities that originate or pass call and message traffic into their networks. The concept extends the established Know Your Customer model from a provider’s direct customers to the upstream providers further back in the call chain, a layer that has been exploited to route illegal robocall traffic into U.S. networks.
The FCC has been moving the framework toward formal rules. The agency released a draft Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on enhanced KYUP expectations on April 29, and on May 20 voted three to zero to issue the KYUP proposal for public comment. A separate Know Your Customer proposal was adopted earlier in a three-to-zero vote. A proposal of this kind typically takes well over a year to move from notice to any final order, so the obligations are not yet in force.
Numeracle offers what it describes as KYC as a Service, a platform that verifies the business entities operating within telecommunications networks. The company says the service handles upstream entity verification and risk evaluation, ties business identity to observed traffic behavior, applies consistent standards across provider networks, and documents reasonable diligence over time, the kind of recordkeeping a KYUP regime would require providers to demonstrate.
The company states that it has extended its platform ahead of any formal FCC mandate and characterizes itself as currently the only provider prepared to support KYUP obligations in practice, a vendor claim rather than an independent assessment. The proposed rules would also require downstream providers to collect business, financial, ownership, and operational information from upstream providers and to take action against suspicious traffic.
The proposed rules sit in the trusted-communications and enterprise-identity space rather than biometrics. If adopted, they would require voice providers to verify and document the identity of the upstream providers handing them traffic, extending identity vetting further back along the call chain than current Know Your Customer obligations reach.
Sources: Numeracle, Federal Communications Commission
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
